Rethinking Contemporary British Women's Writing

Realism, Feminism, Materialism

Emilie Walezak

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350171374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für weibliche Autoren

Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today.
Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader.
Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

1

Introduction

Reading realism anew

The world today is facing an escalation of emergencies that tie in together the climate, social justice and political models: every year, the Global Footprint Network measures the alarming rate at which planetary resources are being consumed, furthering the gap between the high-income North and the low-income South; the 2019 UN report on the unprecedented decline of the planet’s biodiversity was meant to promote a different set of values equating the preservation of ecosystems with social equity against the neoliberal deregulations of the market place. Meanwhile, democratic systems all over the world are at risk. More recently, the 2020 Covid pandemic has put a stop to the global economy and the populations’ right to move and travel.

How does literature address those issues? The novel has been theorized historically as appearing simultaneously with democracy, and philosophically as the literary expression of a political system where everyone was to be represented. The realist novel was particularly attuned to depicting the ordinary lives of common people. And it was attacked precisely for those reasons when suspicious critiques started to cast doubt on the replication of a system that submitted people to mindless daily routines.

Today, however, the daily texture of life as we knew it is being impacted by global upheavals: it has become a risk area where everyone can experience for themselves the detrimental effects of climate change through floods, heat waves and so forth. It is also turning into the potential location from which to initiate emancipatory changes for the future by assuming one’s personal liability within a more global accountability. What mirror does the contemporary realist novel hold up to the reader? Is it really the reassuring image of a normative society as social constructionists would have it? Doesn’t the novel today own up to the challenges we collectively face?

This book aims to demonstrate the vitality and the relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human mediations, local and global scales, author and reader. Moreover it contends that women writers are taking an even firmer stand in their aesthetic choice to depict reality considering the detrimental reception where realist novels by women are concerned. It is my contention that the critical paths of new feminist materialism and posthumanism that have emerged these past decades in response to a dissatisfaction with the material/discursive dichotomy upheld by social construction theories have been reflected in the literary practices of women writers for quite some time. This book will take examples from the works of renowned realist women writers such as Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Andrea Levy and Rose Tremain to illustrate this point. Furthermore, those new ways of envisaging our place in the world are currently gaining ground in the work of post-millennial writers attuned to the ever more pressing issues of the globalized world, climate change and global interconnectivity. The book will thus also examine the works of such millennial writers as Bernardine Evaristo, Sarah Hall and Zadie Smith. The concluding chapter will furthermore reference the works of emerging writers like Sarah Moss and Melissa Harrison.

The study of literary realism has been lastingly impacted by the poststructuralist critique. The habitual critical stance concerning realism can be summed up thus: the conventional aesthetics of the realist text are deemed to be a mirror of its political conservatism. Criticism is even harsher where women writers are concerned as, in the wake of French feminism, linguistic subversion came to be the standard of feminine writing so that realist women novelists were seen as colluding with the liberal system of patriarchy. The postmodernist moment befittingly referred to that earlier modernist revolution of language that was also conceived of as a political engagement. To put it briefly, while modernism exalted the life of the mind against the middlebrow consumption of mass culture, postmodernism sought to expose the constructedness of all cultural artefacts to shake off the yoke of ideology. Heralding the death of the novel effectively meant doing away with the realist novel. And yet realist novels continued to flourish. Critique, however, has remained indebted to the 1970s epistemological revolutions so that, despite the attempts at rehabilitation mounted by such famed scholars as Raymond Tallis or Andrzej Gasiorek, the reception of realist novels, and especially those written by women novelists, still labours under the discomfort inherited from the social constructionist parallel between aesthetic conformity and reactionary orthodoxy.

Thus Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt and Andrea Levy only came to the attention of the academia when they turned to historiographic metafiction, colouring what is standardly considered as naïve realism with a sophisticated self-reflexivity about knowledge power structures. Still the reception of these writers evidences the difficulty of acknowledging realism as a driving force of their writing. The realist dimension of Byatt’s Possession was thus attacked on the grounds of its normative impulse, especially in relation to sexuality. Such scholars as Jackie Buxton, Helen Davies or Lisa Fletcher, to quote but a few, all insist on the reactionary ‘politics of heteronormativity’ sponsored by the ‘related narrative structure’ (Fletcher 2016: 149). Fletcher, who quotes Catherine Belsey’s article ‘Reading Love Stories’, thus associates the reader’s satisfaction with the realist narrative structure as ‘the pleasure of reading itself, [is] the pleasure [. . .] of reading classic realist fiction’ (Belsey 1992: 141).

About Pat Barker’s predominantly realist narratives, Pam Morris has asked:

current critical thinking has difficulty in fully accommodating and appreciating the writing of a novelist like Pat Barker, whose powerful novels such as Union Street (1992) or The Regeneration Trilogy (1991–5) are written predominantly in the realist mode. Despite its radical themes and import, must we write off Barker’s work as cognitively and aesthetically conservative and hence complicit with existing structures of authority and power? (Morris 2003: 43)

Rose Tremain has not garnered much academic attention because, as Sue Sorensen underlined, ‘ambitious and risk-taking in her characters and events, she is less experimental in language and structure than many of her contemporaries’ (Sorensen 2015). The enduring bones of contention whenever the issue of realism arises are thus outlined: its purported aversion to experimentation and hence its complicity with dominant norms, its middlebrow focus supposedly addressing a naïve reader, its charac teristic conventions allegedly confining it to a submissive adherence to the powers that be. And yet realist novels continue to prosper. As Nick Turner wrote, ‘realism is a protean form that should not be dismissed, for our leading novelists are writing within the realist mode, and implicitly questioning its unfashionable status’ (Turner 2013: 51). It is this book’s contention that not only are writers reinventing realism today but that there are also new ways of reading realism. Furthermore, while the new readings this book will offer would apply to male and female writers alike, its focus is on women novelists because, as Chapter 2 will demonstrate, they take the brunt of harsh criticism. To put it simply, because their reception can be particularly affected by the inherited misconceptions about realism, it is then a reader’s task to read anew, or as Nick Turner stated in his book on Post-War British Novelists and the Canon: ‘it is not new to say that women writers are and have been undervalued in literature; however, it does still need to be said’ (Turner 2010: 2). However while the book will address gender and race issues, this is not its main purpose.

Its main purpose will be to pursue innovative reading ventures with the help of the new material feminist and posthuman theories that aim to outline the material agency of human and non-human bodies to challenge the body/mind split inherited from Cartesian dualism. Because those theories primarily refer to the legacy of the linguistic turn, the book will reference the critiques of realism that arose in the wake of Saussure’s theory of the arbitrariness of the sign and were inspired by the works of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser.

Why then do women writers persist in depicting the world realistically against the critical concept of its discursive constructedness? Maybe because matter matters, to quote Karen Barad’s catchphrase that has become the motto of new materialism; or, as A. S. Byatt put it, to capture the ‘thingness’ of things (Byatt 1993: 9). Women writing realistically testify to an attempt to reconcile the challenges of embodied experience with the disputes of social constructions. This book uses the widespread consensus on the codes that typify realism and aims to read anew the use of those conventions in contemporary women’s writing with the help of those theories that developed after the paradigmatic changes effected by feminist, postcolonial and environmental epistemologies: ‘Feminist, postcolonial, and environmental epistemologies have long critiqued modes of knowing that install a gap between the subject and the object of knowledge’ (Alaimo 2014: 15). Thus the definition of realism used in this book is based on its narrative devices and stylistic procedures explored in the following chapters: omniscience, third-person and first-person narratives, temporal and spatial causality, the psychological verisimilitude of characterization, and the real-life accuracy of descriptions. The realist novel today reinvents modes of knowing and of describing reality by representing the empirical experiences of embodied subjects.

When challenging the gap between body and mind, posthuman theorists frequently turn to Spinoza’s monism as promoting an agential view of matter as living matter not bound in oppositions but as a crucible of interacting differences. It is a lay interpretation of Spinoza that uses science and technology to overcome the body/mind divide: ‘For instance, a neo-Spinozist approach is supported and expanded today by new developments in the mind-body interrelation within the neural sciences (Damasio, 2003)’ (Braidotti 2013: 57). A. S. Byatt has written a review of Antonio Damasio’s book, Looking for Spinoza, in which she develops the concept of the ‘embodied mind’ that informs her latest writing (Byatt 2003a) reshaping the body/mind dilemma that characterized her early novels. She further calls on neurosciences as an analogy for her writing work which uses scientific lexicons as varied as that of entomology, geology or oceanography, to design new taxonomies that delineate knowing embodied subjects. The notion of embodiment is crucial to a fresh understanding of realism today and writers like Zadie Smith experiment with the voices of realism to reconcile knowing and feeling. Smith has referenced George Eliot’s attempted translation of Spinoza’s Ethics as the thinking process behind Middlemarch. Realist fiction allows to couch cogitations in embodied subjectivities accessed through omniscience.

In scientific studies, this gap is echoed in the divide between the object of study and the knowing subject. It is no coincidence that some of the major figures of new material feminism are feminist scientists themselves. Donna Haraway used her background as a biologist to contest the disembodied scientific intelligence. In her ground-breaking article from 1988, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, she developed the concept of ‘material–semiotic nodes’ to approach bodies and feminist embodiment in particular. She parallels the feminist history of women’s objectification with the modern scientific stance of detached observation to collapse the distinction between subject and object. It is a feminist gesture of challenging conceptions of subjectivity by appropriating one’s objectified status. Instead of considering subject and object as distinct, Haraway offers a view of the bodies as happening at the nodal point where language and matter meet: ‘Like “poems,” which are sites of literary production where language too is an actor independent of intentions and authors, bodies as objects of knowledge are material–semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; “objects” do not pre-exist as such. Objects are boundary projects’ (Haraway 1988: 595). By describing and questioning current social mutations, realism, too, engages in ‘mapping practices’. True to its original focus on common people and everyday routines, the realist novel has been transformed by the epistemological revolutions of feminism, postcolonialism and environmentalism. Women writers use the realist tools of empathetic and antipathetic characterization to tackle the gender and race divides. Their narratives of various characters’ trajectory registers their struggle with social transformations. Rose Tremain, Pat Barker and Andrea Levy are keen to portray antipathetic characters that cannot cope with the world’s changes alongside emancipatory stories of successful conversions. Sarah Hall uses the geographic boundaries of her native region of Cumbria to map the interrelations between its human and non-human populations – landscapes included – and dramatizes their embodied struggles with the disincarnate decision-making bodies of state and regional administration. Her writing strives to outline the reciprocal imprints of embodiment and embeddedness.

The physicist Karen Barad has developed the concept of ‘agential intra-actio ns’ between ‘material-discursive forces’ which is very similar to Haraway’s nodes (Barad 2003: 810). Barad uses the term ‘intra-action’ to defeat the notion that entities pre-exist, which the term ‘interaction’ presupposes. Instead she envisages the phenomena that emerge in the encounter between matter and language. Her conception is based on Niels Borh’s quantum physics notion that objects and agencies of observation are inseparable in quantum measurements and that describes the processes rather than the states of the particles (Barad 2010). Barad is thus also a posthumanist in that she means to accord agency to human and non-human forces alike. Her goal is to upset the familiar coordinates of thought, including time, space and causality. Barad’s ‘agential realism’ bears strong resemblances to Jane Bennett’s ‘vibrant materialism’ which similarly considers the agency of matter itself (Bennett 2010). Bennett references Spinoza’s monism. She also calls on the new materialism of Bruno Latour and his actor-network theory when she writes about matter as an ‘actant’. The aim of both Barad and Bennett is to design new onto-epistemologies. Contemporary short fiction is particularly suited to the purpose of delivering ‘onto-stories’ (Bennett 2010), narrating the entanglements of organic and inorganic matter like Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ or her latest ‘Sea Story’ (2013), or the enmeshment of the human and the animal as in the stories of Sarah Hall, ‘Bees’ and ‘Mrs Fox’. While the question of ontology might necessitate a deviation from the realist frame to allow for uncommon transmutations, it is my contention that the writers’ short stories intra-act with their novels so that their short fiction sheds light on poetic skills honed and condensed, in particular their work with analogy that defeats taxonomic hierarchies.

In the humanities, the body/mind divide is mirrored in the hiatus between words and things. The collection Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman edited in 2008, Material Feminisms, was meant to address the blind spot of postmodern feminism: ‘Although postmoderns claim to reject all dichotomies, there is one dichotomy that they appear to embrace almost without question: language/reality’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 2). Because bodies and nature in their material dimension have long served essentialist scientific discourses, postmodern feminisms have focused on the discursive construction of constraining social models. New material feminism rehabilitates thinkers like Luce Irigaray to investigate our bodily natures as creative loci of interacting differences whose complex materiality further resonates with the world’s bodies. Stacy Alaimo drew on Haraway’s and Barad’s concepts to develop her theory of transcorporeality in order to ‘think as a body’ as ‘the posthuman being is entangled with the very stuff of the word’ (Alaimo 2014: 16). Transcorporeality is meant to emphasize at one and the same ...